The Ontario election of June 4, 1945, will likely be remembered by historians as the “Gestapo election.” For it was in that election that Edward B. Jolliffe, leader of the official CCF opposition in the legislature, made the remarkable accusation that Premier George Drew was “maintaining in Ontario … a secret political police, a paid government spy organization, a Gestapo to try and keep himself in power.” A provincial Royal Commission was named to investigate Jolliffe's charges. Unfortunately, however, it has been impossible to locate a complete transcript of the Commission's proceedings. It is the purpose of this paper to assess, using the material that is available, the validity of the CCF leader's spectacular accusations.

Most observers agreed that Drew's minority Conservative administration would be re-elected in 1945. Yet the CCF was still considered a serious contender. The CCF's opponents certainly did not discount its challenge. Anti-socialist politicians and professional propagandists alike played heavily on the theme that a CCF government would impose a dictatorship on the citizens of Ontario. The CCF's campaign, in contrast, was relatively undramatic initially. Its propaganda centred primarily upon its uncomplicated “Five Star Programme For Ontario,” the five stars representing security on the job, for the farm, the home, health, and nation.

It is more than two years since the historic 22nd Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. In contrast to the dramatic repercussions in Eastern Europe of the 20th Congress five years earlier, the impact of the 1961 meeting was at first much less striking. The renewed assault on Stalin, this time open and unrestrained, did not generate a comparable intellectual ferment or unleash political forces capable of producing a crisis of the dimensions of 1956. No doubt Khrushchev and the other Eastern European leaders were anxious to avoid the disastrous consequences of that year, when the stability, and indeed the very existence, of communism hung in the balance, at least in Hungary and Poland. This time, certainly, their efforts carefully to control the direction and tempo of change were more successful, and the modest thaw did not produce a flood. None the less, there were serious consequences, often slow in manifesting themselves and differing substantially in each country, but having a long-run potential for modifying profoundly the shape and content of communism in Eastern Europe.

An entirely unforeseen result of 1956 had been the emergence of China as an influential force in world communism, challenging the hitherto predominant position of the Soviet Union. Her extraordinary intervention in the affairs of Eastern Europe during and after the Hungarian revolt had greatly contributed to the stabilizing of the situation, but had marked the emergence of a balance of power within the communist system and the beginning of a serious conflict of policy and doctrine between the two great communist states. Although the full effect of this Chinese challenge was at first somewhat obscured from view, it became increasingly clear that it would have an even more profound impact than earlier defiance by smaller states such as Yugoslavia, Poland, and Hungary. At the 22nd Congress, only the tip of the iceberg of Sino-Soviet differences protruded in the form of the Chinese protest at Khrushchev's public denunciation of Albania. The full measure of the divergence was revealed in the subsequent two years, reaching a climax in the confrontation of mid-1963.